Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday July 03, 2014 @04:38AM
from the power-up dept.

mdsolar writes with news about the cleanup of the site that exposed Harold McCluskey to the highest dose of radiation from americium ever recorded. Workers are finally preparing to enter one of the most dangerous rooms in the world — the site of a 1976 blast in the United States that exposed a technician to a massive dose of radiation and led to his nickname: the "Atomic Man." Harold McCluskey, then 64, was working in the room at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation when a chemical reaction caused a glass glove box to explode. He was exposed to the highest dose of radiation from the chemical element americium ever recorded — 500 times the occupational standard. Hanford, located in central Washington state, made plutonium for nuclear weapons for decades. The room was used to recover radioactive americium, a byproduct of plutonium. Covered with blood, McCluskey was dragged from the room and put into an ambulance headed for the decontamination center. Because he was too hot to handle, he was removed by remote control and transported to a steel-and-concrete isolation tank. During the next five months, doctors laboriously extracted tiny bits of glass and razor-sharp pieces of metal embedded in his skin. Nurses scrubbed him down three times a day and shaved every inch of his body every day. The radioactive bathwater and thousands of towels became nuclear waste.

The clean-up was less due to the severe amount of radioactivity and more due to the fact that he was careless and got it everywhere.

The total amount of radioactive material was small and the actual dose of radiation he was exposed to was probably minimal. Although the exact dose isn't known because he never completely revealed his experiments and he never underwent testing.

One thing I find interesting is that he was arrested again in 2007 on charges related to stealing smoke detectors for their Americium, 13 years after his boy scout experiments.

That doesn't seem to be accurate; the local newspaper describes a fellow technician who dragged him out of the room, and I don't believe they would've had some sort of building-wide system of manipulators that could've then moved him from there to an ambulance:

At any rate, it looks like the glove box was just to allow access to adjust the equipment, and not perform the procedure. So there's every possibility that the actual work was done with manipulators. (You can play around with some of them in the museum in Richland; they're surprisingly nimble.)

In the short term, that analysis may be correct, however for work that is both skilled and dangerous you need to factor in how difficult it will be to find a replacement technician after it becomes known that you let the last one perish. There is additionally the external cost of reduced effectiveness from the management team who would need to work through the emotional impact of watching someone die when they could have helped. Economics can model much more than the actual dollars;)

The important thing to remember here is that he survived 500 times the maximum dose a worker can be legally exposed to.
Try that with any chemical in any chemical plant.

I wouldn't try it for just any chemical; but occupational exposure limits tend to be set (often with the aid of generous quantities of guesswork) around chronic occupational exposure and with the objective of not killing, or crippling too seriously, too high a percentage of the workforce. Asking "What can they breath all shift every shift for years or more without too many of them dropping dead, getting some freaky obscure cancer, or having the liver function of an elderly alcoholic before age 50?" tends to lead to lower, sometimes dramatically lower, numbers than "What can you probably survive, with intensive treatment and ongoing health effects?"

Of course you can be exposed for a short period of time to 500 times the legal concentration of most chemicals. The "legal limit" is usually designed so that regular, 8-hour daily exposure has no long-term health effects, just like the legal radiation limits. Granted, legal limits back then were less conservative.

Then of course it depends how you are exposed. ingestion is not the same as having skin contact. Methanol has a legal limit of 200 ppm, but I can put my hand in liquid methanol (by definition 1 mil

His treatment sort of worked. He ended up with a lot of bad health effects, but kept alive until he was 75, eleven years later. You read about old people living near Chernobyl and now Fukushima. Perhaps their age related decline leads to fewer ways for radiation to be lethal. The quick onset of leukemia seems to affect children more, for example. http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/late... [www.rerf.jp]

Saw a (BBC?) documentary about people living around in the Chernobyl Zone and research done on the food that can be grown there without risk and apparently there are ways to avoid much of contamination if one knows which plants and plant parts to eat and which not. Having luck I suppose plays also a role as there are places there where contrary to what some claim radioactivity killed almost all life. Bottom line is you do not have to die directly of radiation (of the type we talk about here). The atomic man

His treatment sort of worked. He ended up with a lot of bad health effects, but kept alive until he was 75, eleven years later. You read about old people living near Chernobyl and now Fukushima. Perhaps their age related decline leads to fewer ways for radiation to be lethal. The quick onset of leukemia seems to affect children more, for example. http://www.rerf.jp/radefx/late... [www.rerf.jp]

That study shows how even after extremely high exposures, leukemia risk is still quite low in general. I guess the real lesson is that we shouldn't drop A-Bombs near kids.

" He ended up with a lot of bad health effects, but kept alive until he was 75, eleven years later."He died of heart problems. If you read the health effects they are claiming many of them seem just normal for a older person at that time. The rest might could also have been caused by chemical issues more than radiation. Heavy metals are for a large part things you want to avoid putting into your body.The cateracts could be an issue but I know a lot of 70 year olds that have them that have never been near an

He died of heart problems. If you read the health effects they are claiming many of them seem just normal for a older person at that time. The rest might could also have been caused by chemical issues more than radiation. Heavy metals are for a large part things you want to avoid putting into your body.

For people who are interested in this sort of thing, the TOXNET entry [nih.gov] for americium contains a number of excerpts from published work about the case, medical follow up, and eventual autopsy results. The first six case report entries on that page all involve publications involving McC|uskey; look for entries that refer specifically to "US Transuranium Registry (USTUR) Case 246". Because americium is an alpha emitter that principally deposits in bone, it is the bone and bone marrow that are most affected b

There is a corollary to the first law of Superpowerdynamics. If you are a young man, but out of shape, you can get superpowers which will immediately give you a perfect physique even if your powers have nothing to do with muscle tone/burning fat. Unless your power is akin to The Blob in which case you're physique will grow ever larger until, by all rights, you should die of a heart attack from your heart trying to pump blood across your fat-laden body.

First Law of Superpowerdynamics: Only well muscled young men with washboard abs and manboob pecs get super powers

I thought most of them got the washboard abs and whatnot because of their super powers. Consider:1) Captain America: he was a wuss until he was given the serum that made him a super-human.2) Spider-Man: a nerd that got pushed around until he was bitten by a weird spider.3) Batman: used his "Has Gobs of Cash" superpower to get extensive training.

The summary should have mentioned that he died of coronary artery disease, not of radiation exposure. The accident was terrible, sure, but the summary has led some to believe that he died of radiation exposure - which is terrible in a different way.

As far as I am aware the highest radiation dose anyone has received was Cecil Kelley, whom was exposed to a criticality accident at a plutonium processing plant. When the tank stirrer turned on, the geometry of the plutonium solution became critical, exposing him to ~12,000 rem. He died 36 hours later.

Naturally the `record' must be limited to the subset of known cases. I've been studying the history of Soviet nuclear science and industry for a few years. Things went on in the Soviet Union that beggars the imagination, as they say.

When the waste storage tank blew up in Mayak in 1957, 90% of the high level waste fell in the immediate vicinity. That's 90% of 740 PBq (740E15 decays per second) within about half a kilometer radius, in which there were certainly some number of workers, this being the most

"As far as I am aware the highest radiation dose anyone has received was Cecil Kelley..."

Not to be too snarky, but I believe that some former folks at Hiroshima and Nagasaki would beg to differ.

No. To get that kind of radiation dose from a nuclear explosion you would have to be much closer than the altitude the bombs were detonated at. So close that you would be instantly vaporized by the thermal radiation.

Not only did Harold get a dose that was way beyond the LD50 for humans, he lived for 11 more years and died of unrelated causes [wikipedia.org]. His pastor had to convince people he was safe to be around.

Harold was far from the only Tri-Cities nuclear celebrity [exopermaculture.com]. There were also stories about guys who would drop their pants and squat over reactor vents until their balls got a little burned. Think of it like a nuclear vasectomy. I never documented any of those stories but there were a lot of them and worse.

One thing I did personally document was that, adjusted for age, the cancer rate for people who worked at Hanford was not statistically higher than that of the general population.

I achieved my own personal notoriety there by accidentally leaving my dosimeter in my shaving kit and leaving that on an orange Fiestaware platter that was so hot it would light up a pancake meter on three scales. A few weeks later I get a panic call from Rad Services asking if I'm okay. Hehe. God, I hated that place.

Actually, I've got a question about that story you linked. XKCD's "What If" blog did a story a few months ago about what would happen if you were to go swimming in a nuclear fuel pool. He came to the conclusion that as long as you stuck to the surface, the radiation levels would be practically non-existent because of how water impedes radiation. The guy in that article swam and drank from a spent fuel pool, but he probably only swam on the surface and was drinking water from the surface.

At the surface of a reactor pool, the biggest dose of radiation is actually from the tritium created by neutron absorption by the hydrogen in the water molecules. The heat given off by the fuel will create a convective current, so the tritium will be evenly dispersed throughout the pool. Swimming in or drinking the water would obviously not be the best thing due to the tritium contamination (while skin will block the very weak beta radiation, tritium ingested or absorbed through the skin can cause DNA damag

The only thing ignorant people fear more than science in general is "radiation". The reasons for the quotation marks would make for a very long rant about ionizing vs. non-ionizing radiation and their complete ignorance of what is actually going on.

Undue fear of radiation is very prevalent. In this case, the man initially suffered more from the actual explosion than from the massive dose of radiation, and over time he overcame the radiation related issues even though his exposure was on the order of hundreds of times greater than safety limits. Heart disease is what killed him.

Whether you think its Intentional or not, you can always count on mdsolar to submit anything he can find that says nuclear and there is something bad that happened.

Sure, but what does that have to do with the straw man the GP set up? This story is about a very specific accident and doesn't sensationalize it into "all radiation is extremely bad" like the straw man does. We could have an interesting debate about it, but instead ericloewe wants to use it as a platform for attacking people who don't, for a variety of genuine and rational reasons, like nuclear power.

I agree its an interesting story. It really has nothing at all to do with nuclear power. But its also fair to point out trends where the evidence is obvious to anyone who looks, and that is some submitters have an agenda. Consistent submittable of headlines that have nuclear and negative connotations is intended to have an overall impact. Many here don't notice it, so I point it out. Many don't distinguish between nuclear power and other nuclear activities. Many don't read beyond the summary. That's what th

The question was about the apparent paradox of the two cases mentioned.

For some reason, fear of the radiation boogeyman is greater than their confidence in their interpretation of their faith.

Before I'm accused of calling every religious person an ignorant, allow me to add that religion is only one of many possible sources of ignorance (probably none of them guarantee ignorance either) - however, it is a very visible correlation.

The only thing ignorant people fear more than science in general is "radiation". The reasons for the quotation marks would make for a very long rant about ionizing vs. non-ionizing radiation and their complete ignorance of what is actually going on.

Are you aware of the fact there were several decades in which the threat of nuclear war hung over everybody's heads, and the information being given out didn't include these details?

Anybody over 40 probably remembers several years of bomb drills, or the Bay of Pigs, or all sorts of things which most scared the bejeezus out people?

Even when Reagan got elected there was still a lot of fear that some idiot was going to let loose some nukes, and the rhetoric was quite high.

Just so you are informed. Religious reasons for no vaccination is very low on the list and is mainly from groups such as the Amish and the main reason Amish don't vaccinate is not for religious reason but items such as since they are closed community the risk is not as high.

The biggest reasons for people not going with vaccines are not trusting of "big" science and vaccines are loaded with all those chemicals, similar to GMO.

What, wasn't their faith in god strong enough? It works wonders for children without vaccinations...

Sorry nope, and it doesn't seem to apply to children without vaccinations. Then again, pseudoscience does seem to apply to the parents of those who believe in the anti-vaxxer movement. How else can it be so, especially when they believe in debunked studies that were created by an ambulance chaser.

Some one in a article about science had a few sentences about religion.OM!G? How dare your limited world view of all religious people must be zealot hicks be questioned.

Your world view is based on taking everything you disagree with with all the religions, combine it into one over reaching idea of what a religion is and just hate it, because when you put all the stuff you dislike about each one together you get something you really dislike.

the general population everyone has ideas that may not be the same as everyone else

Exactly. There are plenty of people who watch The Bachelor, but it's definitely not for me. That's about as close an example to a religion as I can come up with from pop culture. Or at least it seems to be with some people.

Typically they pray to god for healing, then see a doctor and take medical treatment, then thank god when they get better. The order of the first two steps varies. A few will skip the doctor part and either heal spontaneously (praise the lord!) or die, but most are quite happy to live with the contradiction.

Having seen miracles I feel the need to confirm that the spontaneous healing directly after prayer does indeed result in praising the Lord! Usually the person involved is rather joyful and thankful too:)

I've been witness to numerous "negative miracles", where the divine hand of our Lord decides to inflict his wrath upon some unworthy subject. It often does result in a "God Damnit!", so your hypothesis seems reasonable.

I've been witness to numerous "negative miracles", where the divine hand of our Lord decides to inflict his wrath upon some unworthy subject. It often does result in a "God Damnit!", so your hypothesis seems reasonable.

Shouldnt the "God Damnit" precede the harmful act?

Also, once, I was chastized by a Christian for saying "God Damnit" when I don't believe in god. My excuse was that it was such a good "damn" curse. I don't believe in religion, but I do like their curse words.

No, following the negative miracle is the correct order. The person whom the negative miracle was inflicted on is merely praying for the intercession of the divine being to stop the causing negative miracles. Literally, they are praying to God, asking God to 'dam' the flow of negative miracles.

So it is not cursing at all unless saying 'Hoover Dam' has become a curse.

Of course, many non-believers use a similar curse phrase that nay lead to confusion. The just and enlightened believers are merely praying

It would be an impressive miracle indeed, aside from the bit about having an immune system and mitosis-capable cells. Life is actually pretty good at fixing itsself without supernatural aid. It seems suspicious that God is so eager to heal infections, yet never helps out any amputees.

You got to do something so you can damn the people that don't believe even after all the evidence. You got to do very little so those that believe you did it look crazy and you give people a reason not to believe in you.

You haven't seen miracles, because miracles are imaginary. Just like your imaginary lord, serf. Name one person that prayed to have an amputated limb grow back and got their limb back. Spontaneous remission of disease isn't a miracle, but might be seen as such by soft-headed religious types.

In fairness, I know scientists who are religious and believe in evolution and all the rest of the science, and see God as being outside of all of that, and see the Bible as being allegorical on the points which conflict with science.

Religion isn't always tied with being irrational like the crazies we sometimes see.

Hell, when I went to university there was still a Jesuit teaching physics. He saw no conflict whatsoever between science and religion.

I'm certainly not saying there aren't those who are a little overzealous in their interpretations, but there are many many people who aren't.

73% believe in God, 87% trust scientists at least "somewhat" so, at the very least, 60% of people believe on God AND trust science at the same time! That's assuming there is no overlap.

If you disparage someone for their religious beliefs, you are a bigot. Seriously, you really are. It's not some different thing, you can't cite the crusades as evidence of how evil modern Christians are, you can't point to wars in the middle east. None of that has anything to do with the little old lady down the street that goes to church. You're making an offensive, and more importantly, incorrect generalization about an entire group of people based on the actions of a very small minority that has nothing to do with them at all.

I know this will get modded down pretty quickly on Slashdot. This site is notoriously intolerant of the faithful, but that doesn't make it right. Have fun modding me down troll, just keep in mind you're doing it for the same reasons sectarian bigotry happens all over the world. No one thinks they're a bigot while they're being a bigot. And if you're teaching your kids this mentality at home? Shame on you.

The only religious people I know of that have their beliefs disparaged are those who wish to impose those beliefs on others through the force of law.

You don't like gay marriage? Don't get gay married. Don't like abortions? Don't get one. Fully fund pre AND post natal care. Provide free contraception. Stop trying to force a reading from certain religious to start every government open meeting. Stop trying to keep people from buying alcohol on Sundays. The list goes on and on.

Its ok to hold beliefs those things above are bad or immoral. Don't get the government to enforce your morals on others.

I wonder if you removed the word religious from that sentence above if it still holds true? "If you disparage someone for their beliefs, you are a bigot." What makes religious beliefs so much different than any other kind of belief that it deserves this kind of protection? It seems that whenever anyone complains about the attacks on religious beliefs what they are really saying is that "If you disparage MY religious beliefs, you are a bigot." But if you want to give Mormons, or Christian Scientists, or Rastafarians a hard time, by all means.

I have yet to see a war declared where a faction says, "Science is on our side!" Religion most definitely does.

Science doesn't encourage people to be stupid and proud of it. Religion actively *discourages* critical thinking. There are plenty of studies out there showing strong correlations between religion and education levels. (Yes, I know there are plenty of examples of this to the contrary, but these people are few and far between)

Making fun of stupid, superstitious beliefs is now bigotry? How else do you suggest getting religious chumps to wise up? Education cures many of them as young people, but once someone has failed to reason their way out of religion by adulthood, they're very resistant to reality-based information. Are you a religious chump?

I know this will get modded down pretty quickly on Slashdot. This site is notoriously intolerant of the faithful, but that doesn't make it right. Have fun modding me down troll, just keep in mind you're doing it for the same reasons sectarian bigotry happens all over the world. No one thinks they're a bigot while they're being a bigot. And if you're teaching your kids this mentality at home? Shame on you.

Am I allowed to point how very wrong this particular belief of yours appears to be in reality, or is that off limits?